Sunday, 13 July 2014

Fleet Pond

Fleet pond is Hampshire's largest freshwater lake. It's located next to the station and along with the surrounding area of heath-land and marshland forms a nature reserve that the residents of Fleet are justifiably proud of. My parents live a couple of minutes walk from Fleet Pond and my Dad is an active member of the Fleet Pond Society. When my parents go on holiday I park my car at their house so I can water the garden on my way home from work. A couple of years ago, as I was walking back to their house after work a rainbow could be seen from the jetty at the end of their road. I couldn't resist stopping for a few photos thinking that one day, this would make a nice painting. It's taken me a while to actually paint this. Rainbows aren't easy and I never quite figured out how I could make it work in watercolour. In the end, I decided to try with pastels instead and I'm reasonably happy with the results. It's one of those pictures that I think looks better in real life than it does in a photograph but that's probably a reflection on my photography skills more than anything else. It took a long time to get the clouds right and once I'd finished the picture, there were several weeks worth of tweaks added before I was happy enough to put it in a frame. Part of the reason for eventually putting it in a frame was to stop myself from fiddling with it any further as I was in danger of over-doing it.

The jetty wasn't in my original photo as that's where I stood to take my pictures. I went back another day to take those pictures as I thought it would make for a more interesting picture. The person with his camera wasn't there either. Someone did walk past a moment or two after I took my photos and took his phone out of his pocket to try and catch the same picture. Just as he did that, the rainbow vanished and the rain started. I decided to rewrite history a little in my painting and allow him the opportunity to arrive a minute earlier and catch the picture. It was quite a lovely sight and it's a shame he missed out.